#​560 — December 17, 2024

Read on the Web

🎄 This week we cover a few news items but quickly get into a 2024 roundup of Node news and the most clicked items of the year. Then we’re taking a Christmas break for two weeks and will be back on January 7, 2025.

We hope you have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
__
Peter Cooper and the Cooperpress team

2024 has been a solid year for Node, with the release of Node.js v22 back in April (now in LTS) and v23 in October. Node also got a new mascot this year (above), Express 5.0 arrived, Node has dabbled with type stripping to better support TypeScript, and a native SQLite module has been under active development. Fingers crossed for an interesting 2025!

Node v23.4.0 (Current) Released — There are new

1
--trace-env

,

1
--trace-env-js-stack

and

1
--trace-env-native-stack

options to track environment variable use by a script. Also

1
assert.partialDeepStrictEqual

has been added as a way to more quickly assert certain properties are present in an object – you don’t have to supply them all.

Antoine du Hamel

Complete Intro to React v9: New Project, Modern Stack — Join Brian Holt in building a pizza delivery app from scratch. Master hooks, TanStack Router, testing, and React 19 features in this comprehensive guide to modern React development. No prior React experience needed.

Frontend Masters sponsor

The State of Node.js Performance in 2024 — A thorough exploration (and benchmark) of recent performance advancements made in Node.js. The enhancements between Node 18 and 20 up to version 22 might surprise you – it’s clear the team has put a lot of work into this area.

Gonzaga and Parody (NodeSource)

📄 Benchmarking GraphQL Solutions in the JS/TS Landscape Tomasz Nieżurawski

📄 Exploring the Core Concepts of Node.js Readable Streams Pavel Romanov

📄 Parallel Computing in Node.js via HPX Addons Harris Brakmić

📄 A Deep Dive into CommonJS and ES Modules in Node Damilola Olatunji

QUICK RELEASES:

🥇 Top Node Items of 2024

From an epic 1694 links we included in Node Weekly this year, we’re going to boil it down to the top 8 you clicked on the most:

1. A Guide to Reading and Writing Node.js Streams — I’m not surprised to see this as our most popular link of the year. While streams are a long standing Node feature, they’re commonly misunderstood, and Matteo did a good job of covering their benefits, use cases, and more.

Matteo Collina

2. The Nine Node Pillars — An interesting list of self-proclaimed ‘principles for doing Node.js right in enterprise environments’ written by a group of prolific Node contributors. It acts as a checklist to identify gaps in your current practices, particularly when building larger scale apps.

Snell, Venditto, Dawson, Collina, et al.

Automate Embedding Creation and Syncing in Postgres with pgai Vectorizer — 🚀 pgai Vectorizer automates embedding creation and syncing in Postgres with one SQL command—keeps embeddings updated, no tools needed.

Timescale sponsor

3. 10 Modern Node.js Runtime Features to Start Using in 2024 — It’s not just Bun and Deno adding new features by the dozen over the past couple of years, there’s plenty of new stuff in Node too. How many did you use in 2024?

Liran Tal

4. Introducing Express v5 — We first spied the release of Express.js v5 in September but the official blog post eventually dropped in October and explained the broad plan for Node’s long standing Web framework. v5 remains a ‘bleeding edge‘ release with work still required in areas of security (such as this security audit) and overall processes.

Wes Todd (Express)

5. TypeSpec: A TypeScript-Inspired Way to Define APIs — A language for concisely describing cloud service APIs and generating other API description languages (e.g. OpenAPI), client and service code, docs, etc. v0.63 has just been released, by the way.

Microsoft

💡 Nate Totten’s ‘Bringing Types to APIs with TypeSpec‘ will give you an idea of the practicalities of using TypeSpec.

6. zx v8.0: Google’s Way to Write Shell Scripts with Node — A long standing way to make shell scripting a more pleasant experience with Node. zx provides useful wrappers around

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child_process

, escapes arguments and gives sensible defaults. v8.0 made zx 20x smaller, faster, makes it easier to kill processes, pass input to commands, and more. It remains the latest major version, with v8.2.4 landing a few weeks ago.

Google

7. The Node.js Best Practices List: 2024 Edition — An in-depth guide for Node developers that we link to most years. Divided into eight sections and updated regularly, it digs into areas from error handling and code style to Docker and security practices.

Yoni Goldberg

8. Announcing AdonisJS v6 — A TypeScript-first backend Web framework with amazing documentation and packed with features out the box. v6 was a huge step forward that moved to using ESM by default and remains the latest major version, despite being released in January.

Harminder Virk

📰 Classifieds

🔍 Uncover the hidden complexities of event-driven systems and the myth of “loose coupling.” Gain insights into building resilient architectures. Read more.

30% of people we polled said they handle HTTP caching by just “praying it doesn’t break”. We built something to help 🤯

We hope you have a good break, if you’re taking one, and we’ll be back on Tuesday, January 7, 2025.


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